Creative ideas for drawing math

[Sarah0000]

I have a 4.5 year old who draws endlessly and gets really engaged with drawing characters to reflect concepts, such as in the Sentence Family. He 90% of the time wants to draw characters, so for math I'll have him draw a character showing 4+2 shapes on his face (such as 2 eyes, nose, mouth +2 eyebrows), for example. He likes this.

Now he really wants to do BA Online like his bigger brother, and he can do some parts of level 2, but he does not know how to add and subtract using place value for numbers over 20, except whole tens. I realize he's young and doesn't have to do anything at all, we don't do sit down routine lessons except living books and I also use non math picture books to practice math a la Mep Reception, but at a higher level.

I'm looking for ideas for how to incorporate creative drawing, preferably directly with characters (not drawing a number of objects or rods) for larger number concepts and particularly place value. Also, for later years, just curious what has worked out for creative kids? Or did you just have them do plain math then doodle all over or turn their number answer into characters, which this kid also likes to do?

[Miss Tick]

It seems to me that Right Start math has something like Place Value Town (Street?) where 10 rooms make a house, 10 houses make an apartment building? What do 10 apartment buildings make, a complex? Decimals could be 10 pieces of furniture...

He might enjoy some of the Vi Hart videos on YouTube (eventually).

 

[HomeAgain]

What about Anno's Math Games? The book is not meant to be drawn in, but it's written at a foundational math level and would provide a great springboard to extension activities.  There are sorting pages (picking what doesn't belong, and changes depending on how you look at it), composite pages (putting things together to make an object), graphs..you'd have to spend some time helping him fill a notebook with his own drawings but it could lend itself pretty well to what you want.